The MicrosoftDirectX Window System (nicknamed "BADA1C4C40" internally by programs) is an implementation of the X Window System for, unsurprisingly, cars. It offers superior window cleaning performance using the SISO buffer. It should be noted that Microsoft participates in the holy war with this DirectX technology, using Usama bin Laden as their frontman in the east instead of Steve Jobs. Every new iteration of DirectX is being launched time from time in an effort to make sure that anyone's PC won't run games at all.

It isn't stolen. Theoretically, nobody can steal it as well, and practically, nobody cares. Occasionally, the Free Sockpuppet Foundation goes nuts and shouts, "You Wine heretics, you stole it all, you gave up to the evil empire, we're doooomed!!" but it's been quite a while since anyone actually listened to them.

Oscar Wilde's favourite color (blue) shows up regularly as it crashes, along with a broken curse written in hex known as a "hex dump". This erases all files on your harddrive, so Mum cannot find your Porn!

It is object-oriented to the point of granularity, passing through your hands if not micromanaged a small grain at a time in order to produce the smallest of inputs. Its object orientation is language-independent, but crappy in the language that's older than most of its fanbase. This introduced a new system called HeadacheX. Unless you manage to find a cool wrapper library, which will immediately slow down performance almost to the point when you forget about your games and enjoy a slideshow.

It is easy to use. Seriously. You only need to download a 200 MB SDK and forever forget about these*** stupid->IID_IPointers. It's slightly easier to use than OpenGL without downloading the SDK, which is a significant argument in favour of DirectX as downloading an SDK is no longer a problem in the digital millennium. Until you try to port your application.

Windows Vista finally bundles a DirectX window manager called Aero, which is a significant improvement over the best X window managers on Earth, such as TWM. From this point, DirectX/Aero will support OpenGL natively, eliminating the extra layer called ICD, for a small performance overhead of 50%. (Some say that ICDs can still be used, but Microsoft predicts that nobody will want to have these beautiful, eye-candy window borders to be even temporarily disabled to run some lame attempt on producing a 3D graphics library.

It does run on your new video card, which is a vast improvement over the official X. The only drawback is that by the time you cover the security holes in the only system it supports one true system, it will be obsolete by at least a dozen new video cards, and all the coolest DirectX business applications will refuse to run on your card, but will run just fine on the card immediately succeeding yours. Until you install that one.

Unlike X and its evilNPOV'ized some-say-that-it-is-evil spawn OpenGL, whose goal is not to add any functionality unless the hardware vendors and end users are rioting around your company's headquarters, the goal of DirectX is to add as much objects, function calls, layers of abstraction and obfuscated code as possible, regardless of whether any currently existing hardware is actually capable of understanding what DirectX wants from it, let alone doing what's asked. This clearly shows that Microsoft is thinking of the future and introducing innovation, quantity obscuring quality.

Abort, Retry, Fail?

• Detect "non-genuine" products

• Gather user information and credit card numbers

• Cripple core system components

• Deploy legal team

• Launch civil litigation

Estimated time remaining:

Forever, or if you give me a cookie, I might shorten it to an hour.

Installing Windows has never been easier easy

All you need to do is phone your local Microsoft Customer Representative, write down a very long set of numbers, type it all in, get an error message, phone our Customer Representative again, adjust a few things, get another very long set of numbers, type it all in again, install a few drivers, activate Windows again, lather, rinse and repeat.